The tour that gives you the Pompidou Centre’s art collection all to yourself

Ever wondered what it would be like to have one of the world’s great art museums to yourself? At 9.30 on a chilly morning last week, I found out.

The museum in question is the Pompidou Centre, in Paris. For more than 40 years, its inside-out spaghetti of ducts, lifts and escalators has made it one of the French capital’s must-see buildings, but the fuss about the architecture has long obscured its magnificent collection of modern and contemporary art. Home to the National Museum of Modern Art, it is brimming with works by the likes of Picasso, Matisse, Braque and de Kooning.

Sadly, it’s also brimming with crowds — not quite on the Louvre’s scale, but still an estimated 3.34m a year (or 15,000 a day).…

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